


summer of '84

by arabellagaleotti



Category: Iron Man (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: 1980s, Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Surfers, California, Gen, Tony Feels, Tony Stark Needs a Hug, Tony Stark-centric
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-28
Updated: 2019-10-18
Packaged: 2020-09-28 10:47:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 2,630
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20424704
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/arabellagaleotti/pseuds/arabellagaleotti
Summary: When he turns six, he’s shipped off to a boarding school across the country, in California.He stays there until fourteen, and finds an odd kind of freedom in the Golden State.OR,Yeah, Tony Stark can surf.





	1. summer day

29th of May, 1970. 

It's an important date; at least to him but not to his parents, apparently. He’s told his father gets the call from somewhere in D.C., nods, hangs up and books a flight back to New York for the next week. In all fairness, he did cut the visit short by three days.

His mother is as unstable as they come, by three she’s at the ‘private spa resort’ more than she’s out of it, at five she’s on enough pharmaceuticals to drug an elephant.

He barely knows his father, he’s always busy on business trips. When he is there, Tony looks at him sometimes and wishes to be someone else when he grows up. Aren't little boys meant to aspire to their fathers, want to be them?

Anna and Jarvis mostly look after him, he gets a few governesses on and off, but they never last long; he’s a problem child, evidently.

When he turns six, he’s shipped off to a boarding school across the country, in California. He stays there until fourteen, and finds an odd kind of freedom in the Golden State.

Being rich is different here, in New York, it’s dinners that cost more than the average paycheck, it’s expensive rooms in penthouse hotels, it’s board meetings and business deals. Here, it’s tennis courts and pools, boxtox and plastic surgery, it’s sunning yourself on terraces. It’s sweat, sun, sipping ice-tea, long afternoons.

On the weekends, once he gets old enough (and before, if he’s honest. You can jump the fence in the corner of the field pretty easily) he goes to the beach. Everyone else goes into town, shopping, food, malls. He sits in the dunes and watches the surfers paddle into the blue.

It really is beautiful, in the way sand particles cling to his skin. In the way the waves crash along the shore. In the way surfers catch the right moment, the right current and shoot along the curl of a wave.

It’s not even properly summer yet, but it's scorching, and by the second weekend out there he buys a hat with a little of his hard-earned allowance that Jarvis sends him each week.

He’s been sitting there for three weeks in total when a girl approaches him. She’s got dark, wet hair hanging down her back, her wetsuit is purple and black. He’s seen her before. She’s good, quick on the uptake. Hardly ever wipes out.

They watch each other as she approaches. "Tell me," she shouts across the dunes, and the wind nearly carries her voice away, "what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?"

“What?” he shouts back, sure he's misheard her.

She gets closer, and lowers her voice. “It’s a quote. Mary Oliver. It’s kinda my thing.”

“Oh, that’s pretty cool,” he says, meaning it. 

She smiles, almost embarrassed. “Thanks. Let me start again,” she takes a big breath, “Hey,” she says.

“Hey,” he replies, keeping his tone even. He doesn't know what she wants; and people always want something.

There’s silence, for a moment.

“My name is Lucy.”

“I’m Tony.”

Silence, again. He wonders if she knows who he is. Anthony Stark, the _prodigy_.

“I've seen you watching us surf,” she doesn't say it all accusatory, like other people do when he's caught doing something he not necessarily shouldn't, but is just weird. She says it like: _ ‘what’s the atomic number of calcium?’ _in science class.

“Yeah,” Tony admits. “I like the beach, the water.” '_it's_ _20.'_

“Me too,” she laughs, dropping down onto the sand next to him. “It’s brilliant, isn’t it? 70 percent of the world, just like this.”

“Not all of it." He thinks of fjords in Sweden, of jumping into ice-cold water. He thinks of women on the beach in Italy, topless and tanned all over. 

“No,” she agrees, “but it’s all water.”

They’re silent, again. One figure on the water falls to a wave. They watch him surface before they say anything.

“Why don’t you stop watching, and do it?” Lucy asks. She’s dissecting some dune grass with her fingernails.

“I don’t know,” he says, “I'll fail.”

“What's the point if you don’t?” she asks, staring out the water, not at him.

* * *

They borrow a board from one of Lucy's friends, she says he can rent a beginner board from the surf shop later. They spend a few minutes on the beach practising how to do it but he gets too impatient and he’s a genius, anyway, right?

Tony kicks off his shoes and his shirt and they wade into the water, close enough to hold hands. 

It’s not, cold, exactly, just _ bracing_. He sucks in a deep breath and holds it in, like a balloon about to burst. 

They lie flat on the boards and paddle forward, he’s clumsy, unsure, but he picks it up pretty quick. They float over a few swells; Tony feels his spirit lift with them.

Soon they’re sitting upright on their boards, waiting for a good wave. The water is long and flat and Tony feel like he has infinity laid out in front of him for a second. He feels like this is the cusp of his young life, the first moment that _ truly _ matters in a long time. 

“Ready?” Lucy says, “you wait until there’s a good wave, when it's a few meters away, then you start to paddle towards the beach. Get on your feet like we practised when you’re on the peak. Plant your feet on the board, bend your knees and keep your arms loose. If you wipe out, jump towards ocean-side, not beach. Got it?”

“Yeah,” Tony says a little shakily. “Sure.”

She laughs at him. “Come on, genius.”

In front of them, there’s a disturbance in infinity, the water is drawing up in a wave. A few other surfers, before idly sitting on their boards, now straighten, busy getting ready.

Tony positions himself to run away, like Lucy said, and keeps his head craned back to watch the wave as it gets closer.

He wipes out, of course, he makes it two seconds before his board overturns. He can hear Lucy's laughter as he does. The water is properly cold this time. He holds his breath and squeezes close his eyes and waits for it to be over.

He turns around in the water a few times, doing somersaults like he used to in the pool back in New York. He hears Anna call something out at him for a moment but the board connected to his ankle gives a sharp tug, and he's wrenched out of the moment, back up to reality.

Lucy is further down the beach and along a few meters. She throws her hand above her head and waves, laughing.


	2. one day in the life of ivan denisovich

After a few bouts of -- attempted, on Tony's end -- surfing they go out to the diner up the beach where they make fries and milkshakes and burgers.

They slide into a side booth by the window and laugh so hard Tony thinks he’s going to throw up into his strawberry thickshake.

Tony learns that Lucy’s parents immigrated from Japan before they had her, that they live three bus stops away and that she has been surfing since she could swim.

He tells her that he was born in New York, goes to the elite boarding school up in the hills and that he wants to go into engineering. He doesn't tell her about the mansion back home, about the butler, about the money. About the father. 

It’s like a stereotypical high-school movie about summer except he and Lucy don’t share an awkward kiss at the end.

* * *

They get sunburnt and tan, spend all weekend in the water until Tony thinks it’ll take forever for his fingers to go back to normal.

They don’t always hang out at Surf-rider or Topanga.

No, no, they find half a dozen spots around Southern California and dive into the cool water. They visit hidden beaches and tourist spots. Lakes and swimming holes.

He gets recognised at one, by a wide-eyed ice-cream vendor. Tony wills him to stay silent and flashes him a smile when Lucy turns away. 

Sometimes they don't surf they; just wade out into the oncoming tide, until their toes barely touch the sandy bottom and the ocean could just swallow them whole, like some inky-blue creature of legend. 

It’s the most fun he’s ever had with someone of his peer group. At school, he doesn’t fit in. Part of him does, of course, the rich part, the famous part. The smart part doesn’t, the part that doesn’t like playing sports as well as the part that mouths off to those bigger than him.

And of course before all he had were tutors and Jarvis, Anna, Obie, mama, sometimes. Now he has Lucy.

* * *

“Would you like to be immortal?” Tony groans, sunbathing on the beach. Lucy is flopped next to him, hair up in a bun.

“I am thinking of aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pigments, prophetic sonnets, the refuge of art. And this is the only immortality you and I may share, my Lolita.”

“Lolita, 1955,” he says instead of her. She laughs, hits him on the shoulder. 

“That's my line,” she grumbles. 

“Sorry. But, would you?”

“Eh, maybe. Seems a bit boring.”

“Think about it, don’t you wanna see the world change, from literally every place. With time, you could do anything. God, you could do _ all _ of it.”

“Eventually we’d run out, though. And everyone we know would die.”

Tony hasn't seen his mother for years. “I don't think that's so bad.”

Lucy rolls over. “Well, I guess it could be kinda interesting,” she murmurs. 

“I win.”

She snorts. “Of all creatures that breathe and move upon the earth, nothing is bred that is weaker than man. That’s Homer.” 

“So what?”

“_ Man _.”

* * *

One day, as the day is drawing to an end, as the sky is pink and as Tony says he has to go, she grabs his wrist.

“But what if you don’t?” she asks, eyes wide. 

He laughs, shrugging and playing it off like a joke: “what? I have to.”

“But really?” she asks, “is anything telling you not to?”

“Uhh... no.” he smiles, growing across his face like a wildfire. “No. Nothing. Nothing is holding me back.”

They dry off as much as they can then run to catch the last bus to her street. 

Tony has never really been on real public transport like this. Once, when his mother took him to Switzerland, he rode on a tram. And he’s been in a van across a runway before too -- ooh, and taxis!

It’s strange. The bus is empty, Lucy nods at the bus driver and Tony just flushes and smiles. They take a seat at the back of the mostly empty bus as it trucks though dark streets, golden lights flickering.

Tony sways with the rhythm of the wheels, and Lucy bumps shoulders with him, smiles a secret smile that's just between them, this moment and the ghost-seats.

They get off and Lucy tugs him down a little track that leads to a little, sandy beach without any real waves, just little things that chase each other up the shore like dogs.

He gapes, open-mouthed at this little slice of heaven while Lucy steps forward and drops down onto the sand like a dead fly. “Come sit down.”

The night is cool and busy with bugs, birds tweeting in the trees, laughter drifting over from a backyard cookout. 

He comes over, sits next to her in silence. This is the most perfect night that has ever been, like the moon, like the water, like the thrill of staying past curfew. 

"In our village, folks say God crumbles up the old moon into stars." She smiles, a little wryly, glancing around at him a little. “Alexander Solzhenitsyn.” She answers before he asks. 

“That's a good one, Luce. It makes sense,” he tilts his head back, stars at the wide, spinning expanse of galaxy above their heads. At the old moon. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thank you all so much for reading!


	3. Augustus, 14BC

Lucy has loads of friends that surf, Tony’s introduced by a week. He doesn't remember their names but he knows they're all pretty friendly. 

Sometimes, if the waves are boring and enough of them are out there, they form a circle on the water, boards facing each other. It's like out of a movie.

“Are you guys ever scared of sharks?” Tony asked, staring down into the depths; they’re murky and green.

“Nah,” one says, as stereotypical as they come, with shaggy blonde hair and green eyes. "not very likely."

“Docile, too, if you don’t look too much like a turtle or a seal,” another jokes, his name is Joe? 

“Don’t fret about it, Tony,” Lucy says, laying back on her board. “You’re gonna be okay.”

The realisation hits Tony like a bag of bricks, it nearly makes him gasp. His fingers tighten around the board and he can just think: _ i'm gonna be okay. _

* * *

His father calls three months later. He’s going to MIT next year. He’s one of the youngest ever entrants, at 14. He should be happy, proud. Surprise: he’s not. He begs his father not to, Obie too, complains to Jarvis, anything to try and stop it. 

There’s nothing he despises more than his boarding school, but he loves the sea.

Massachusetts is landlocked.

He tells Lucy, and she only hugs him like he’s already gone and tells him to come back soon.

He lies and says _ i will. _

Promises have never tasted so bitter.

He thinks the last time he ever goes out on the water is the best but then he remembers the first, and doubts his so-called genius. He just lies in that middle space and spreads his arms like he’s waiting for the sky to take him.

Lucy paddles over and flicks water onto his face. He tilts his entire body and just rolls into the cool water. He can hear her laugh and she pulls him up by his ankle. He almost wishes she didn’t, and he could just sink down into the deep.

“Ergh.” He complains, shaking his head like a wet dog.

“It’s not so bad,” she tells him. “You can come back. There’s holidays.”

“You’ll forget me,” he complains.

“Probably,” she snickers, and dives under his board like a seal. He follows her, leans to the other side to watch her glide through the water. She’s left her board on the beach, but she’s wearing her wetsuit.

Tony inspects the borrowed board, there’s a dozen scratches and gashes from the people before him. He’s not half bad now, he had been thinking of getting his own.

“I found Rome a city of bricks and left it a city of marble” a voice interrupts his pondering. He looks up, and Lucy is perched on the side of his board like a bird on a brace. Her eyes are looking up at him keenly, and her fingers are white from where they grip the edge. 

“What’s that from?” 

“Augustus. He was a Roman Emperor.”

“Yeah. Bit of a prick, actually.”

"Didn't he make a horse the president?"

"That was Caligula. And he made it a consul."

Silence hangs between them, like laundry on a line, swaying on a dead breeze. 

He checks his waterproof watch, and sighs. His ride to the private airfield is soon, he has to go.

“I gotta go,” he says, and it sounds like he’s just got curfew.

“Bye, Tony.” He will never forget her like this, a child of the ocean, wet hair, bare feet, shining eyes. He will never forget this entire summer.

“See you later.” Bitter, bitter.

* * *

He never sees her again.


End file.
